My week in Europe is off to a great start. Yesterday, I was in Frankfurt, Germany with back-to-back meetings with partners and customers. It was nice to start the day off meeting with IT Novum, a Pentaho partner of four years.

It has been good to hear about the big data market really gathering pace here in Germany, and that there is such widespread interest. One of the markets that is strongest for Pentaho in Germany is the embedded analytics market. While several Pentaho team members were busy yesterday not too far away in Hanover, Germany speaking about big data and embedded analytics at CeBIT, I had a chance to meet with our OEM partner Godesys and learn about how they embed Pentaho into their full ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution – which they have deployed to an impressive 600 customers.

I was impressed by our partner Inovex who is also working on some fantastic big data customer deployments. It was great to hear a few excellent big data Hadoop case studies including one of the largest media companies in Germany using Pentaho and Hadoop to analyze customer behavior patterns across all channels, particularly web and television.

In Germany, our greatest success last year was with customers across different industries using Pentaho to embed analytics into their commercial software. There are several reasons for this, some of which are unique to Germany and others that reflect a larger global industry trend.

Germany has a vibrant software industry with excellent growth rates and even better forecasts for this year than last. The most important driver for this growth is the large body of highly specialised, medium-sized software companies, which belong to what we in Germany call, the “Mittelstand”. Many of them build specific solutions for our established automotive, chemical and mechanical industries, to name a few.

These companies’ customers are increasingly starting to demand analytics and reporting capabilities to be embedded into their core software applications, not only to make industrial and business processes more efficient, but to lay the foundation for Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 is a movement in Germany that aims to bring the ‘Internet of Things’ to established industries in order to create smart factories that are ready for the future. Advanced analytics is likely to play a vital role in preparing the ground for this movement.

Being specialists themselves, industry-specific software companies suspect that its much more resource and cost-efficient to partner with a business analytics specialist like Pentaho rather than build one on their own. Examples in the industry prove this to be true. A recent webinar we hosted with Montclare, which provides SaaS advisory services, revealed that over the course of five years, embedding analytics can be up to three times less expensive than building ‘home-grown’ functionality.

Here are three recent examples of German customers embedding analytics:

Kirchhoff Datensysteme Software GmBH (KDS) is a software development and system house with more than twenty years of experience developing independent and industry-specific solutions. KDS’ OEM partnership with Pentaho enabled it to build Poly.Mis, a highly specialized analytics tool for the plastic compounding industry.

INFORM offers advanced optimization software solutions for six industries including aviation. The company embedded Pentaho to complement its GroundStar product for optimizing aviation processes with the business intelligence module GS BIS, helping their customer to achieve service levels and INFORM to sell more of its software.

USU is a provider of IT-Service-Management (ITSM) solutions and consulting services. Its OEM partnership with Pentaho enabled it to build USU Service Intelligence, a cross-systems analysis tool that allows anyone in the customer’s IT department to easily run reports and pinpoint the root causes of problems.

There are plenty of resources and tools for companies interested in embedding analytics here.

If you are at CeBIT and want to learn more about our embedded analytics, or OEM programme, please meet me at our booth in Hall 6 A18!

Pentaho new CEO, Quentin Gallivan, visited five countries in five days and was able to meet with several influential press, analyst, customers and the EMEA Pentaho team. The great press from this tour is just starting to publish. Here are a few articles that have appeared: